Towards Product-related Knowledge Asset Warehousing in Enterprises

Although the concept of knowledge asset management is known for years, there are almost no methodologies that can help its implementation in companies. Even if we are focusing only on product related knowledge assets, we face the problems associated with the diversity of products and companies, and ambiguity and complexity of knowledge. This paper presents a framework methodology that specifies the main actions to be taken by companies to use product-related knowledge as asset. The methodology involves identification of the product-internal and productexternal knowledge as well as the decomposition of them to manageable units of knowledge. The paper proposes multi-layer multi-representation ontology for high-level formalization of various units of product-internal knowledge. The ontology arranges the units of knowledge in hierarchical layers and domains, and re-establishes the interrelationships and contextual dependencies amongst them by links. The applicable forms of representation are also discussed. The methodological framework can be applied to structuring and representation of product external knowledge.